Huffyuv is a very fast, lossless Win32 video codec. "Lossless" means that the output from the decompressor is bit-for-bit identical with the original input to the compressor. "Fast" means a compression throughput of up to 38 megabytes per second on my 416 MHz Celeron.

I encoded a five second clip. Loaded the resulting file into Vegas and added a caption 'copy01' - so Vegas was forced to re-encode rather than it doing a 'no recompression' save. I then encoded that, loaded it back in, changed the caption to 'copy02' so I could keep track and so on...

Using the convert to YUY option I found there was slight quality loss on each additional encode with the chroma moving to the left slightly (one pixel?).

In the other modes - predict left, predict median and so on - there was no loss whatsoever. I went up to eight re-encodes using predict left/predict left and stopped, because it was obvious there was no loss. I don't know how anyone could see increased grain or a change of colour in this mode.

Convert to YUY gives a file that is about half the size but it seems you take a small quality hit right from the first capture/encode, compared to the other compression options.

I'm not sure why other people reckon that Convert to YUY is 'lossless'. Maybe they are just cutting the video and resaving which, as I already mentioned, results in a no recompression frame-for-frame save in some software? As soon as you add filters or effects you are reencoding.

Using huff for 4 years now, no problems at all. Caution: there's no such thing as a truly "lossless" AVI compressor other than plain uncompressed AVI. However, if you do any cleanup of the huff-compressed original and/or take multiple steps to compress/recompress the video, the grain and noise levels increase noticeably -- apparently no detail gets lost, but salt-and-pepper "simmer" on subsquent compressions is easy to see, especially in darker areas of the image. Not perfect, but it still seems to be the AVI compressor of choice. Only thing better is uncompressed AVI.

This version offers the promise of vastly improved disk utilization (3 times smaller file sizes). However, every file I've created ends up crashing Adobe Premiere (6.0, 6.5), VirtualDub, TMPGEnc, and other processing programs when I load the file.

One can encode, but not use the file. This makes the encoder (beta) worthless.

I'm using it with iuVCR for captures, using the fastest compression settings (with a BT878 chip, which should be YUY2), field threshold of 288 lines (PAL) and no other boxes ticked. I'm getting 704x675 captures perfectly, and in sync.

You need a fast processor - despite being very quick and mainly for throughput, it will still eat processor cycles - it should be under 50% usage to capture without frame drop (I'm using an XP2500). I advise you use a fast drive with a clean partition for best performance, otherwise you can get some frame drop. Optimizing Windows also helps - kill background tasks that might access the drives.

I have found it's not a good editing codec. I've found it won't always stitch together, and I've also had no luck recompressing. Maybe some of the other lossless codecs out there may be better for editing/reprocessing, but they are all slower, so not good for capturing.

Some of you seem to have problems which I con not confirm. Either with VirtualDubMod or with Virtual VCR it works perfectly well. The quality of the files is amazing. I use it to record tv-programs and sometimes wonder why everting seems to be so easy.

This codec is the best for speed and quality.It is completely lossless,unlike PIC Video MJEG(Which I would recommend using if you dont have much space on your hard drive and have a slow PC with little RAM)
Oh by the way I am talking about Huffyuv version 2.1.1 .The newer version is no good as far as I'm concerned,when I tried to open the outputted AVI,Windows Explorer would crash.I tried 'Always suggest RGB as the output format'option but it made no difference.
STICK TO HUFFYUV 2.1.1

I downloaded the latest codec the other day, without noticing all the problems listed here. I was converting some divx .avi's to huffyuv for editing and for later conversion to MPEG2. Anyway, Virtualdub had no problem encoding the files, but when I would go into Windows Explorer, and JUST HIGHLIGHT the file, Explorer would immediately crash.

I was just trying to check the file out to make sure everything was in sync. It will not play in Windows Media player (v9) and would still crash Explorer. It took me a while to figure out that it was the codec. I installed an earlier version and now I don't have any problems. It is always possible that "always suggest RGB format for ouptut" would work as suggested by dreze, but I'm going to stick with the previous setting.

Ive just tried this version out it seemed to of worked when captured with huffy 2.20 and can read it in Media Player and VirtualDub but when i tried to edit it in premiere premiere wouldnt let me put it in the timeline to edit the clip.
Also when i edited it in VirtualDub then saved it with huffy 2.20 it became unuseable.

I would recommend to stick with the original huffyuv 2.1.1 version as it work excellent for me. and if a new version comes out i would recommend to test it thoroughly to make sure it works 110%. Also if you dont see an improvement in a newer version it might also pay to stick with 2.1.1 as it works.

On my Win98SE system, I usually don't capture with HuffYUV, but recompressing in VirtualDub to version 2.1.1 was highly reliable. The 'files' produced by v2.2.0, however, are completely unusable. Stick with version 2.1.1.

Before I went to hardware mpeg2 captures I used HuffyUV with VirtualDub to capture AVI's. It cut my AVI's sizes in half with no loss in quality. Saved me alot of harddisk space.

Posted December 22, 2003 by gkar.

Tool version 2.2.0
using OS WinXP

Ease of use 10
of 10

Functionality 10
of 10

Value for money 10
of 10

Overall score 10
of 10

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